NASCAR sent a loud message with last week’s historically harsh penalty on Brad Keselowski and the No. 6 Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing team for an infraction discovered on Keselowski’s car during a technical inspection at NASCAR’s research and development center in Concord, North Carolina. Along with slapping Keselowski with a penalty of 100 driver points, the sanctioning body threw the proverbial book at Keselowski crew chief Matt McCall with a $100,000 fine and four-race suspension. To make matters worse, NASCAR stripped Keselowski’s team of 100 owner points and said that Keselowski would be docked 10 points at the start of the playoffs if he qualifies.
While NASCAR has offered few details on the nature of the infraction, the message is pretty clear: Bend the rules at your peril. In other words, if NASCAR catches a team playing too much in the gray area, that team will pay a steep price both literally and figuratively. So expect the scrutiny to continue this weekend at Richmond and throughout the remainder of the season as NASCAR seeks to drive home the point that tampering with its first-year Next Generation Cup Series car is a big no-no. Almost inevitably, though, one or more teams will still push the envelope too far on their setup and end up on the wrong side of NASCAR as a result.
It this happens, look for NASCAR to throw down the gauntlet once again and maybe even go as far as suspending a driver, which is something that the sanctioning body has not been known to do for a rules violation involving just the race car itself and not something that happened on the track, in particular.